This project will continue to investigate the development of children's understanding, knowledge, and attitudes regarding health and illness, including colds, cuts, heart disease and HIV infection (AIDS), and to determine their influence on subsequent AIDS risk behaviors during the elementary and junior high school years. In the prior study, understanding of disease processes, knowledge about AIDS, health attitudes, and sources of information about AIDS were assessed in a sample of 307 black and 306 white elementary schoolchildren in grades 1, 3, and 5 and their parents. In this longitudinal follow-up to the prior study, understanding, knowledge, and attitudes about AIDS are reassessed in the same children and their parents and measures of risk behaviors are introduced with the older children. An interdisciplinary panel of experts will contribute to the development of the risk behavior assessment instrument in conjunction with an evaluation process using group and individual discussion with a sample of 60 children in grades 5 and 7. Risk behaviors assessed include health behaviors, use of abusable substances, and sexual behaviors. Confidential self-administered surveys are used for assessment of risk behaviors and individual interviews are continued for assessments of understanding, knowledge, and attitudes. The design permits examination of the potential influence of developmental, ethnic, familial, and socioeconomic factors on children's understanding and knowledge of AIDS and on children's AIDS risk behaviors.The goals of this longitudinal study are to investigate in black and white third, fifth, and seventh grade schoolchildren: 1. Development of understanding of AIDS and other health problems. 2. Development of AIDS knowledge and attitudes (perceived severity, vulnerability, health locus of control, self-efficacy, values, and risk taking) and changes in the relationship of understanding to knowledge and attitudes. 3. Relationship of prior and current perception of personal control to taking responsibility for prevention of health problems. 4. Cohort effects in understanding, knowledge and attitudes regarding health and illness, including cold, cuts, heart disease and AIDS. 5. Educationally appropriate terminology, process, content, and sources of information about AIDS. Additional goals are investigated in seventh grade schoolchildren and evaluated for appropriateness in fifth graders: 1. Development of health risk behaviors, particularly those related to risk for AIDS, i.e., use of abusable substances and unsafe sexual behaviors. 2. Perceived vulnerability to and severity of sexually transmitted diseases (STD). 3. Relationship of prior and current knowledge and understanding to health risk behaviors. 4. Relationship of prior and current health attitudes to health risk behaviors. 5. Educationally appropriate terminology, process, content, and sources of information about STDs. 12 specific hypotheses will be tested. The research team includes two developmental psychologists, two health educators, a medical sociologist, and a pediatrician.